This is a large abstract painting on canvas. I created it in my basement studio during CoViD-19 lockdown. In my personal life, this painting was made between the birth of my first son (February 2020) and the death of my first dog (April 2020). I was told recently that you should not rely on your emotional state to lend context to your work. I'm not sure how much I believe that, but I also don't think you need to know these facts to read the work, I think they just add some flavor.

I am interested in the power of abstraction to delve into big problems in understanding the nature of our existence. I wonder quite a bit about what it means to be a conscious being, and if there are other ways a conscious being might be. I have come to believe that one of the fundamental aspects of consciousness is that it is a phenomenon that happens when desperate but related systems come together to form a larger whole.

My paintings are like snapshots of mental landscapes, exploring the space between order and chaos which gives form to the conscious experience. One of the underlying themes present throughout this collection is the juxtaposition of pattern and tightly controlled but highly repetitive brush work against the uncontrollable mark making techniques such as pouring and dripping paint. I’m also using a sort of automatic drawing process and incorporating little snippets of text into the work, little distillations of epiphenomenal qualia that are omnipresent in the unquiet mind.

Taken as a whole a given painting should give the sense of being a complete system, balanced and self maintaining. A given segment might have its own system of rules and relationships, but it ties into the larger whole the way a person’s e.g. love of their child and their understanding of mathematical relationships both contribute to the conscious experience of being that person.